The Future Is Big Data in the Cloud
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
Um, kinda... no.
This is a decent article, and he's free to give a plug to his portfolio even if it's disguised as a disclosure. But it's disingenuous at best to call Cloudera "the" company behind Hadoop when 80% of the code flows from Yahoo. It's like calling Transmeta "the" company behind Linux.
You could say that MySQL isn't the company behind MySQL, too.
Cloudera is the only pure Hadoop company, really. They also distribute and maintain the machine images used by almost everyone, now. http://archive.cloudera.com/docs/ec2.html
As a founder of Cloudera and a participant in the Apache Hadoop community, I'm dismayed whenever the press writes something about Cloudera "creating" Hadoop. No one here believes that, and we try to acknowledge the great work done by the community, especially at Yahoo!, Facebook, Amazon, Powerset, et al., whenever we can.
To the best of my knowledge, we're the only company to provide a commercially supported distribution of Hadoop. I'm pretty sure that's what Ping meant when he says "behind"--supporting, not necessarily solely creating.
Anyways, it's an open source project, and the copyright belongs to the Apache Software Foundation. In the case of Linux, no one organization contributes more than 13% of the code (e.g. http://lwn.net/Articles/222773/). The same distribution of contributions will likely be the case for Hadoop as it matures, and it's reasonably close to that state now: there are subprojects to which neither Yahoo! nor Cloudera is the primary contributor, and it is most certainly not the case that 80% of all Apache Hadoop code comes from any single organization.
Either way, Hadoop is the most interesting open source project with which I've been involved, and I hope the increasing attention doesn't distract the community from its primary goal of producing kick-ass code.
Later, Jeff
I've talked to the Northscale guys, sounds like their onto good stuff and I'm not faulting them (just as I wouldn't fault Cloudera), Ping just needs a copy editor.
You walk in your office, and your phone/pda pulls down your days tasks from your desktop/laptop wirelessly and update everything. Maybe that data lives in a cloud, but it could be local to the company, it could be just that desktop, or it could be in a giant data warehouse.